and the base of this obelisk covered the actual site
where the vestry now is, it looked like a gigantic needle shooting
up from the middle of truncated columns, walls of unequal height, and
half-carved stones.
On the right of this building, a ruin from its cradle, arose the
Vatican, a splendid Tower of Babel, to which all the celebrated
architects of the Roman school contributed their work for a thousand
years: at this epoch the two magnificent chapels did not exist, nor the
twelve great halls, the two-and-twenty courts, the thirty staircases,
and the two thousand bedchambers; for Pope Sixtus V, the sublime
swineherd, who did so many things in a five years' reign, had not yet
been able to add the immense building which on the eastern side towers
above the court of St. Damasius; still, it was truly the old sacred
edifice, with its venerable associations, in which Charlemagne received
hospitality when he was crowned emperor by Pope Leo III.
All the same, on the 9th of August, 1492, the whole of Rome, from the
People's Gate to the Coliseum and from the Baths of Diocletian to the
castle of Sant' Angelo, seemed to have made an appointment on this
piazza: the multitude thronging it was so great as to overflow into all
the neighbouring streets, which started from this centre like the rays
of a star. The crowds of people, looking like a motley moving carpet,
were climbing up into the basilica, grouping themselves upon the stones,
hanging on the columns, standing up against the walls; they entered by
the doors of houses and reappeared at the windows, so numerous and so
densely packed that one might have said each window was walled up with
heads. Now all this multitude had its eyes fixed on one single point in
the Vatican; for in the Vatican was the Conclave, and as Innocent VIII
had been dead for sixteen days, the Conclave was in the act of electing
a pope.
Rome is the town of elections: since her foundation down to our own
day--that is to say, in the course of nearly twenty-six centuries--she
has constantly elected her kings, consuls, tribunes, emperors, and
popes: thus Rome during the days of Conclave appears to be attacked by a
strange fever which drives everyone to the Vatican or to Monte Cavallo,
according as the scarlet-robed assembly is held in one or the other
of these two palaces: it is, in fact, because the raising up of a new
pontiff is a great event far everybody; for, according to the average
established in t
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